Yarima Ariza has been getting unwanted attention for her unruly tresses since she was a teenager in Bogota. Her school was a strict French institution, and girls weren’t allowed to wear makeup or jewelry. “In 1986 the perm came to Colombia and girls started wearing them,” says Ariza. “The director of the school started calling them bad names like ‘fatal woman’ because they were doing something artificial to their bodies. He didn’t know if I was wearing one or not, but he would punish me anyway. He used to pull my hair and scream at me in his French accent in front of everybody.”
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Ariza and her mother decided that she should wear her hair pulled back, and Ariza didn’t let it down again until 1994, after she’d moved here and started classes at the School of the Art Institute. “People started telling me that I had beautiful hair. I felt insulted at the beginning, but then I started playing with it and braiding it and enjoying it. I started accepting myself the way I am.” Ariza has never cut her hair and has visited a beauty salon exactly once–to get her hair done for her aunt’s wedding. “The guy who did my hair spent three or four hours trying to straighten it,” she says. “He was taking breaks to smoke, and his hair dryer broke in the middle of it. I could see him sweating and I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said he would never do my hair again.”
On one side she printed close-up photos of the hair on her head, eyebrow, arm, armpit, pubis, and leg, as well as the top of her head and a handful of hair from a brush. She included space for the recipients to write their names, the date of their last haircuts, and comments about their hair. “I had them handwrite it,” says Ariza, “Writing makes my project a more personal, international experience. I can see their handwriting. I can enjoy the color of the ink. It’s more realistic than anything else.”
